Tuesday, 28 September 2004

Ever get the feeling you're being shagged up the arse? Well, you are! Want to sort out the economy? Make tax avoidance a criminal offence punishable with massive fines (like your whole income) and prison!

The super-rich are fleecing us by avoiding taxes, and it should be a matter of public record

by George Monbiot

Behind every great fortune there are two crimes: the crime required to obtain it, and the crime required to maintain it. Well, that isn't quite true. There may be no moral difference between evading tax and avoiding it, but there is a legal one. If a rich man is well advised, he can lawfully keep every penny to himself.

Until this has been sorted out, there is precious little point in proposing, as both the Liberal Democrats and a group of rebel Labour MPs did last week, that income tax be increased to 50% for people earning more than £100,000 a year. It is just, it is necessary, but it simply raises the incentive for the very rich to find new means of staying that way.

Tax avoidance in the United Kingdom deprives the exchequer of between £25bn and £85bn a year, according to the Tax Justice Network. It's hard to get your head round these figures, until you see that the low figure more or less equates to the projected public-sector deficit for this financial year. The high figure represents 74% of the income tax the exchequer receives. It is more than we spend on the national health service. The super-rich are fleecing us.

Gordon Brown keeps promising to deal with them, and keeps ensuring that he does no such thing. In his budget speech this year, he made bold claims about closing existing loopholes, before rejecting the only measure which could guarantee that new ones don't open up a "general anti-avoidance rule". This rule would have made all tax-avoidance measures illegal, whether they were devised before or after it was introduced.

A few minutes after his brave assault on tax cheats, Brown announced "an overall reduction of 40,500 staff" at the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise. No one made the connection. Two years ago, Nick Davies completed an exhaustive investigation of the Revenue for the Guardian. He discovered that the government's efforts to catch tax avoiders had already "collapsed in a heap of mismanagement and staff cuts". "All the specialist offices are struggling with too few experienced staff" as a result of massive cuts during the 1990s.

In his speech in Brighton yesterday, Brown mentioned tax policy just once, when he scoffed at one of the means - European tax harmonisation - that would have made it harder for the rich to shift their money overseas.

The problem is that there is almost no public pressure for a real war on tax avoidance. Last week, the Tax Justice Network opened an office in London to try to focus attention on the issue. But it's not likely to feature much in the corporate press. Patience Wheatcroft, the business editor of the Times, attacks the Treasury for regarding tax avoidance as "tantamount to extreme wickedness". Coincidentally, her employer, Rupert Murdoch, is the most successful tax avoider of all. When the Daily Telegraph was owned by Lord Black, it argued that people had "a legal and moral right to work out how to pay as little tax as possible, a right which it is in the interest of all citizens to uphold". It's not very likely to change its position: its new owners, the Barclay brothers, live in tax exile. The tabloids slaughter the welfare cheats, and spare the tax cheats.

Understaffed, underfunded, detested, the Inland Revenue has found that the easiest way of dealing with its crisis is to appease the avoiders. In 2002, Davies reported that it was covering for the corporations and the super-rich by refusing to release its figures on enforcement.

My own, more limited, experience suggests that nothing has changed. I sent the Inland Revenue a list of questions last week. Is it true, I asked, that (as the Liberal Democrats have claimed) "the poorest fifth of the population pay a higher percentage of their income in tax than the richest fifth"? Has the contribution from the richest fifth been rising or declining? Is it true that there has been a shift of income tax receipts from the rich to the poor and middling over the past 10 years? What proportion of total public revenue does income tax provide? Has this been rising or falling?

The Revenue's press officer rang me back. "These questions," he told me, "are blatantly political." Eventually, he promised to send me an email. When it came through, the answer to all of them was: "No such analysis is published by the Inland Revenue." I asked him whether the Revenue had produced an estimate of the amount of money lost through tax avoidance. It hadn't.

This is mind-blowing. The Inland Revenue claims that it has made no attempt to discover whether or not its policies are working, and whether or not the results are fair.

Monday, 27 September 2004

Iraq, remember, was going to be the role model. It would be the catalyst, 'crucible' even, of the new Middle East

by Robert Fisk

We are now in the greatest crisis since the last greatest crisis. That's how we run the Iraq war - or the Second Iraq War as Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara would now have us believe. Hostages are paraded in orange tracksuits to remind us of Guantanamo Bay. Kidnappers demand the release of women held prisoner by the Americans. Abu Ghraib is what they are talking about. Abu Ghraib? Anyone remember Abu Ghraib? Remember those dirty little snapshots? But don't worry. This wasn't the America George Bush recognised, and besides we're punishing the bad apples, aren't we? Women? Why, there are only a couple of dames left - and they are "Dr Germ" and "Dr Anthrax".

But Arabs do not forget so easily. It was a Lebanese woman, Samia Melki, who first understood the true semantics of those Abu Ghraib photographs for the Arab world. The naked Iraqi, his body smeared with excrement, back to the camera, arms stretched out before the butch and blond American with a stick, possessed, she wrote in Counterpunch, "all the drama and contrasting colours of a Caravaggio painting".

The best of Baroque art invites the viewer to be part of the artwork. "Forced to walk in a straight line with his legs crossed, his torso slightly twisted and arms spread out for balance, the Iraqi prisoner's toned body, accentuated by the excrement and the bad lighting, stretches out in crucifix form. Exuding a dignity long denied, the Arab is suffering for the world's sins."

And that, I fear, is the least of the suffering that has gone on at Abu Ghraib. For what happened to all those videos which members of Congress were allowed to watch in secret and which we - the public - were not permitted to see? Why have we suddenly forgotten about Abu Ghraib? Seymour Hersh, the journalist who broke the Abu Ghraib story - and one of the only journalists in America who is doing his job - has spoken publicly about what else happened in that terrible jail.

I'm indebted to a reader for the following extract from a recent Hersh lecture: "Some of the worst things that happened that you don't know about. OK? Videos. There are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib... The women were passing messages out saying please come and kill me because of what's happened. And basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been recorded, the boys were sodomised, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking..."

Already, however, we have forgotten this. Just as we must no longer talk about weapons of mass destruction. For as the details slowly emerge of the desperate efforts of Bush and Blair to find these non-existent nasties, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. US mobile site survey teams managed, at one point, to smash into a former Iraqi secret police headquarters in Baghdad, only to find a padlocked inner door. Here, they believed, they would find the horrors that Bush and Blair were praying for. And what did they find behind the second door? A vast emporium of brand new vacuum cleaners. At Baath party headquarters, another team - led by a Major Kenneth Deal - believed they had discovered secret documents which would reveal Saddam's weapons' programme. The papers turned out to be an Arabic translation of A J P Taylor's The Struggle for Mastery in Europe. Perhaps Bush and Blair should read it.

So as we continue to stagger down the crumbling stairway of our own ghastly making, we must listen to bigger and bigger whoppers. Iyad Allawi, the puppet prime minister - still deferentially called "interim prime minister" by many of my reporter chums - insists that elections will be held in January even though he has less control of the Iraqi capital (let alone the rest of the country) than the mayor of Baghdad. The ex-CIA agent, who obediently refused to free the two women prisoners the moment Washington gave him instructions not to do so, dutifully trots over to London and on to Washington to shore up more of the Blair-Bush lies.

Second Iraq War indeed. How much more of this tomfoolery are we, the public, expected to stomach? We are fighting in "the crucible of global terrorism", according to Lord Blair of Kut. What are we to make of this nonsense? Of course, he didn't tell us we were going to have a Second Iraq War when he helped to start the First Iraq War, did he? And he didn't tell the Iraqis that, did he? No, we had come to "liberate" them. So let's just remember the crisis before the crisis before the crisis. Let's go back to last November when our Prime Minister was addressing the Lord Mayor's banquet. The Iraq war, he informed us then - and presumably he was still referring to the First Iraq War - was "the battle of seminal importance for the early 21st century".

Well, he can say that again. But just listen to what else Lord Blair of Kut informed us about the war. "It will define relations between the Muslim world and the West. It will influence profoundly the development of Arab states and the Middle East. It will have far-reaching implications for the future of American and Western diplomacy."

And he can say that again, can't he? For it is difficult to think of anything more profoundly dangerous for us, for the West, for the Middle East, for Christians and Muslims since the Second World War - the real second war, that is - than Blair's war in Iraq. And Iraq, remember, was going to be the model for the whole Middle East. Every Arab state would want to be like Iraq. Iraq would be the catalyst - perhaps even the "crucible" - of the new Middle East. Spare me the hollow laughter.

I have been struck these past few weeks how very many of the letters I've received from readers come from men and women who fought in the Second World War, who argue ferociously that Blair and Bush should never be allowed to compare this quagmire with the real struggle against evil which they waged more than half a century ago.

"I, now 90, remember the men maimed in body and mind who haunted the lanes in rural Wales where I grew up in the years after 1918," Robert Parry wrote to me. "For this reason, Owen's 'Dulce et decorum est' remains for me the ultimate expression of the reality of death in war, made now more horrific by American 'targeted' bombing and the suicide bombers. We need a new Wilfred Owen to open our eyes and consciences, but until one appears this great poem must be given space to speak again." It would be difficult to find a more eloquent rejoinder to the infantile nonsense now being peddled by our Prime Minister.

Friday, 24 September 2004

I wonder how the Mirror pensioners would feel if they knew their funds were used by Maxwell to give to the Mossad so help them further their nefarious aims. If you only read two books in your whole life they should be "By Way of Deception" and "Other Side of Deception" both by Victor Ostrovsky, how that guy is still alive I don't know but read his books and then tell me he made all that shit up!

The Contrasting Media Treatment of Israeli and Islamic Death Threats

by Victor Ostrovsky

Robert Maxwell's contact was not in the best of moods when he received a call on a special secure line at the Israeli embassy in Madrid. Maxwell was phoning from London, saying it was imperative that a meeting be set up. He was willing to come to Madrid. {p. 284} OCTOBER 30 1991

The ties between Maxwell and the Mossad went back a long way. Elements within the Mossad had offered to finance Maxwell's first big business ventures, and in later years Maxwell received inside information on global matters from the Office. Maxwell was originally codenamed "the Little Czech," and the sobriquet stuck. Only a handful of people in the Israeli intelligence community knew who the Little Czech was, yet he provided an unending supply of slush money for the organization whenever it ran low.

For years, Maxwell would hit financial lows whenever the Mossad was in the midst of expensive operations that could not be funded legitimately and when other less legitimate sources were unavailable, as was the case after the American invasion of Panama in 1990, which dried up the Mossad's income from drug trafficking and forced Maxwell to dig deep into his corporate pockets.

But the Mossad had used its ace in the hole one time too many. Asking Maxwell to get involved in a matter of secondary importance (namely, the Vanunu affair) had been a big mistake, for which the media mogul would be made to pay the price.

That involvement caused suspicion in the British Parliament that there was no smoke without fire, particularly after the publication of a book by an American reporter claiming Maxwell was a Mossad agent. Maxwell retaliated in a lawsuit, but the ground was starting to burn under his feet. The Mossad was late in giving him back his money, and the usual {p. 285} last-minute rescue of his financial empire was looking less and less feasible.

For Maxwell, what was already bad was about to get worse. His call couldn't have been more poorly timed. Israel was participating in a peace negotiation process that the Mossad top clique believed would be detrimental to the country's security. At the same time, news was reaching the Office of a growing scandal caused by Mossad involvement in Germany. This scandal was a result of Uri's having made a call to the Hamburg River Police informing them that a shipment of arms was about to be loaded onto an Israeli ship.

The arms consisted of Soviet tanks and antiaircraft equipment, concealed in large crates marked agricultural equipment. The shipment had been arranged with the help of the BND, without the knowledge of the German government or the Ministry of Defense. It was exactly the same equipment that the Ministry of Defense had refused to send to Israel in March of the same year, because they believed the shipment would defy the German law forbidding the shipment of war materiel to a conflict zone.

The Mossad's right-wing element wasn't sure to what extent this scandal would grow. They remembered very well the scandal that had occurred in 1978 when the German police had allowed Mossad officers posing as German intelligence officers to interrogate Palestinians in German prisons. If the German government could contain the situation, things would be fine. But once the story was in the hands of the media, there was no telling where it would go.

And then came this call from Maxwell, insisting he must meet his contact on a matter of great urgency. The mogul was rebuffed at first, but then he issued a veiled threat: Now that he was being investigated by Parliament and the British media, if he wasn't able to straighten out his financial affairs, he wasn't sure he could keep the Kryuchkov meeting a secret.

What he was referring to (and in doing so, he sealed his fate) was a meeting that he'd helped arrange between the Mossad liaison and the former head of the KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov, who was now jailed in Number Four Remand Center in Moscow for his role in the Soviet Union's August coup to oust Mikhail Gorbachev.

At that meeting, which took place on Maxwell's yacht at anchor in Yugoslav waters, Mossad support for the plot to oust Gorbachev was discussed. The Mossad promised to bring about, through its political connections, an early recognition of the new regime, as well as other logistical assistance for the coup. In exchange, it requested that {p. 286} all Soviet Jews be released, or rather expelled, which would create a massive exodus of people that would be too large to be absorbed by other countries and would therefore go to Israel.

Certain right-wingers within the government had believed this meeting with the coup plotters was a necessity. They knew that if the Soviet Union were to stop being the enemy, there'd no longer be a threat from the East, and the strategic value of Israel to its greatest ally, the United States, would diminish. Alliances between the United States and the Arab nations in the region would then be a realistic prospect.

It was Maxwell who'd helped create the ties with the now-defunct KGB. The right-wingers realized it would be a devastating blow to Israel's standing in the West if the world were to learn that the Mossad had participated in any way, as minute as that participation might be, in the attempted coup to stop the democratization of the Soviet Union. It would be perceived as treason against the West. Maxwell was now using the Mossad's participation as a threat, however veiled, to force an immediate burst of aid to his ailing empire. His contact asked him to call back in a few hours.

A small meeting of right-wingers at Mossad headquarters resulted in a consensus to terminate Maxwell. At first, the participants thought it would take several weeks to put together a plan, but then someone pointed out that the process could be accelerated if the Little Czech could be made to travel to a rendezvous where the Mossad would be waiting to strike.

Maxwell was asked to come to Spain the following day. His contact promised that things would be worked out and that there was no need to panic. The mogul was asked to sail on his yacht to Madeira and wait there for a message.

Maxwell arrived in Gibraltar on October 31, 1991, boarded his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, and set sail for Madeira, as instructed. There he waited for directions. Meanwhile, the Mossad was getting read to strike. On Friday, November 1, a special Mossad troubleshooting team that was in Spain to cover the peace talks was dispatched. The team flew to Morocco, where they were met by a confederate who'd already taken care of all the necessary equipment and other arrangements.

At first, Maxwell was told that the meeting would take place in Madeira and that he'd receive as much money as he needed to calm the situation. Additional moneys would be advanced to him later. All this was to be kept completely quiet, since there was no point in pro- {p. 287} viding more fodder for his enemies, who would have liked nothing better than to show his direct connection to the Mossad.

On November 2, the Mossad learned that Maxwell had called his son in England and scheduled a meeting with him on the island. Maxwell was told to cancel the meeting. He was also told that the meeting with the money people would now take place on the island of Tenerife.

When he reached Santa Cruz on the island of Tenerife, he headed for a meeting in the Hotel Mency. As he dined alone in the hotel restaurant, someone walked over to him and gave him a message indicating that he should be in Los Cristos on the other side of the island the next morning. He was to make his way there in his yacht, sailing around the island of Grand Canary.

I learned all this in a phone conversation with Ephraim. He had no idea how the Kidon team had managed to get to Maxwell at sea while the yacht was cruising at fifteen knots, but making it look impossible was part of the Kidon magic. Some time during the night of November 4-5, the Mossad's problem was laid to rest in the salty waters of the Atlantic.

After an autopsy that raised more questions than it answered, a second autopsy was held in Israel under the watchful eye of the security apparatus. Whatever was not detected then was buried forever on Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, the resting place for the nation's most revered heroes.

"He had done more for Israel than can today be said," Prime Minister Shamir eulogized at Maxwell's burial.

{end of selections}

Victor Ostrovsky, now living in Canada, hosts a weekly radio show called Spytalk

Thursday, 23 September 2004

Ok, here's how we sort things out; we impeach and jail that nasty warmongering Tony and make this nice fluffy one Prime Minister, then we give him a free-hand to reorganise the government!

by Tony Benn

At the moment when the prime minister has announced his decision to intensify the war in Iraq and when more British troops may well be sent there, the time has come for new policies to be adopted since we know, in great detail, all the key facts from very authoritative sources.

We know from Paul O'Neill, George Bush's first treasury secretary, that the new president took the decision to invade Iraq when he entered the White House - almost a year before the attack on the twin towers - and that no one in Washington orLondon really ever believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the atrocity.

The real reason for the invasion was to topple Saddam, seize the oil and establish permanent US bases to dominate the region. And we know that Tony Blair privately shared these objectives, and used the weapons issue to persuade parliament and public.

We also know, from the recent report of the Iraq Survey Group, that Baghdad did not possess weapons of mass destruction. Neither the president nor the prime minister has been concerned to discover that they misled their own people and the world on this question. And it has not led them to reassess their arguments for going to war.

No serious thought was given by Washington or London as to the likely consequences of the war and what policies should be pursued after the war was won. The warnings they received that an occupation might lead to chaos were dismissed out of hand.

Many Iraqis held in detention have been tortured and abused by the forces of those who argued that they were there to stop those very practices, introduce democracy and safeguard human rights. And no attempt has been made to count the number of Iraqis killed or injured, which reveals a complete failure of respect.

The supposed transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government has now been proved to be illusory, since Ayad Allawi has about as much sovereign control as Fidel Castro has over Guantánamo bay, where the US base remains against the will of the Cuban government.

Kofi Annan, as secretary general of the UN, has now told us that that war was illegal and contrary to the provisions of the charter - which only provides for military action in self-defence or when authorised by the security council - which must mean that those Iraqis now defending their own country are acting within the law.

Yet, at this very moment, we are hearing threats issued against Iran for its nuclear programme, not least from Israel, which has a huge nuclear arsenal and might even repay its debt to Bush by bombing the Iranian nuclear plants, as it did to an Iraqi installation in 1981.

Wednesday, 22 September 2004

Ok America, it's official, you have now undeniably LOST YOUR FUCKING MIND! If Yusuf Islam is a terrorist then we are all terrorists! Where will this end? Tell me that America? Where will it end? With the deportation of Muslims? Gas chambers at Guantanamo Bay? Think I'm crazy? This is where fascism starts, deporting Yusuf Islam is first, gassing Muslims en masse is simply a bit further down this road your on, can't you see that? Don't any of you care?

A security alert involving the singer who used to be known as Cat Stevens has forced a London-to-Washington flight to be diverted to another US airport.

The plane was already in the air when US officials identified that the singer, whose name is now Yusuf Islam, was on one of their "watch lists".

United Airlines Flight 919 was diverted 600 miles (1000km), landing in Maine.

After an interview, the singer - who converted to Islam in 1977 - was denied entry into the US.

Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials said the access was denied "on national security grounds", without giving any further details.

The Security Service is haunted by a terrible fear: that another Israeli prime minister will be assassinated. The extreme right wing, which does not hide its admiration for Yigal Amir and his deed, harbors some who dream of a similar action. After all, if Amir succeeded in murdering the Oslo process, why shouldn't another Amir succeed in murdering the process of dismantling the settlements in the Gaza Strip?

But the Security Service also entertains an even greater fear: that a Jewish terror group will bomb the mosques on the Temple Mount.

Years ago, a Jewish underground organization was preparing to do exactly that. It was uncovered before it could carry out its plans. Now similar plots are afoot.

The Security Service believes that this action is intended to put an end to Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan. Bombing the al-Aqsa Mosque and/or the Dome of the Rock would inflame the whole Arab and Muslim world. It would cause profound upheavals, bring down Arab regimes, perhaps ignite a fundamentalist revolution throughout the region. In such a situation, who would think about evacuating settlements?

All this is true, but it does not touch the roots of the conspiracy. The bombing of the Haram al-Sharif mosques is an enterprise that goes well beyond topical issues – it is a revolutionary act that would change the Jewish religion itself. From the point of view of the potential bombers, that is the main thing.

In Israel, Jewish history is divided into three "houses," meaning three temples:

The First Temple was supposedly built by King Solomon in the tenth century BC and destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in the year 568 BC. The people of Judea were taken as captives to Babylon and about 50 years passed before they were allowed to return to Jerusalem and build the temple again.

The building of the Second Temple was finished in 516 BC. It was renovated and expanded by King Herod around 20 BC and destroyed by the Roman general Titus in 70 AD.

The Third Temple does not exist, but the new Jewish community that started to establish itself in Palestine in 1882 often calls itself the "Third House." (When Moshe Dayan became hysterical at the beginning of the Yom Kippur war, he started lamenting the "Destruction of the Third House"). But this is only a symbolic term – not one of the Zionist movement's Founding Fathers nor any of the founders of the State of Israel dreamed of building a new temple.

The reason for this is rooted in the events of 1,934 years ago. When the Romans besieged Jerusalem, before the town fell and was destroyed, a leading rabbi, Yokhanan Ben-Zakkai, was smuggled out in a coffin. He approached the Roman commander and succeeded in getting permission from him to establish a Jewish religious center in Yavneh, between Jaffa and Asdod.

Tuesday, 21 September 2004

Three Years After Terror Attacks, Public Still Doubts 'Official' Story

Three years after the events of 9-11, half of the residents of New York City believe U.S. leaders had foreknowledge and “consciously failed” to act to prevent the disasters, while two in three want a new investigation of the “still-unanswered questions.”

In the first survey of public opinion about allegations of U.S. government complicity and whitewashing of the events of 9-11, a Zogby International poll found that fewer than two in five New Yorkers believe the official 9-11 commission “answered all of the important questions about what actually happened on Sept. 11.”

One in two New York City residents say that senior government officials “knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around Sept. 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act,” according to the poll of Aug. 24-26, 2004.

Sixty-six percent called for another full investigation, by Congress or Elliot Spitzer (left), New York’s attorney general, to resolve the “unanswered questions.”

“I think these numbers show that most New Yorkers are now fed up with the silence, and that politicians trying to exploit 9-11 do so at their peril,” said W. David Kubiak, executive director of 911truth.org, one of the groups that commissioned the poll. “The 9-11 case is not closed, and New York’s questions are not going away.”

The New York Times, on the other hand, told puzzled readers on Sept. 11, 2004, that it’s possible to know what happened on 9-11 “without knowing what happened.”

“In the three years since 9-11, we’ve begun to understand that it’s possible to know what happened without knowing what happened,” the editorial began. “Some of what we need to know publicly has been provided by the report of the 9-11 commission. Other answers are lacking.”

Sept. 11 is “a central event in this nation’s history,” the Times editorial concluded. “It’s important that we who live most immediately in its shadow press hard to learn everything that can be learned about that day and to make sure that nothing is allowed to fade into the world of the publicly unknowable.”

The New York Times efforts, however, did not include sending a reporter to either of the two recent 9-11 conferences held on Broadway in downtown Manhattan that addressed the unanswered questions.

The first event, “The 9-11 Citizens Commission: The Omissions Hearings,” was held Sept. 9 at Symphony Space on Broadway. This six-hour conference was chaired by former Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) and brought together panels of experts who presented new evidence and raised questions about the official version of what happened.

The second event, “Confronting the Evidence: 9-11 and the Search for Truth,” was held at the Manhattan Center Ballroom during the evening of Sept. 11.

While American Free Press participated in both conferences, The New York Times, which says it should “press hard to learn everything that can be learned about that day,” confirmed it had not covered either event.

While the Times carried a 9-11 story daily during the days leading up to the third anniversary, its reporting failed to ask critical questions. For example, in a Sept. 10 article entitled “Falling Bodies,” the fate of more than 1,000 people trapped in the twin towers above the levels impacted by the planes is discussed without mentioning the possibility of rescue by helicopter—or the fact that the doors to the roof had been locked.

Friday, 17 September 2004

If you look up the word "warmonger" in the dictionary, it says "See Richard Perle". Conflicts of interest all over the place Mr Perle is making very large amounts of money from war and suffering, not to mention over a thousand dead GIs! Codshit reserves special loathing for Perle, this is why!

Richard Perle, a foreign policy guru who has oozed his way through Republican administrations for two decades making a fortune as he went, has met his match in Conrad Black, the former head of Hollinger International, the U.S.-based newspaper conglomerate. Black stepped down as Hollinger CEO after being accused by shareholders of being a crook.

As Black goes down, Perle, who worked for the Bush administration and deserves as much credit for the Iraq war as anyone, is going with him. A special committee investigating Hollinger's financial losses accuses both men of corruption.

Perle is an important figure for he stands at the nexus of power and money. More than most, he has advocated policies that would make him money.

Perle, along with Henry Kissinger, serves on the Hollinger board of directors, as well as on the board of the Jerusalem Post, part of Black's newspaper empire. The Hollinger committee accuses Perle of "flagrant abdication of duty" and of "putting his own interests above those of Hollinger's shareholders," and called on him to return $5.4 million in pay. It wants $200 million back from Black.

Perle, who served as chairman of the Bush administration's Defense Policy Board until being forced out in May because of other conflicts of interest, initially defended Black against the charges brought by the shareholders. Now, however, from his summer home in the South of France, Perle says Black "misled" him.

Black, in turn, accuses Perle of "nest-feathering, dissembling and obfuscation."

A center of ethical controversy as long as he has been in Washington – twice in the 1980s over perceived conflicts of interest with Israel – Perle has survived because of powerful patrons like Kissinger and Black, whose wife, Barbara Amiel, also serves on the board of the Jerusalem Post. Black's Hollinger holdings include some 200 publications, including conservative newspapers such as the Chicago Sun-Times, London Daily Telegraph, Sydney Morning Herald and Jerusalem Post.

Perle turned down an appointment in the Bush Defense Department in order to take the position as chairman of the policy board and continue his business interests, which center around Trireme Partners Ltd., a company that invests in defense and security companies and has Kissinger as one of its advisers.

Perle was forced out of his Pentagon position when it became public this year that Global Crossing was paying him to lobby the Pentagon at the same time he was heading the Pentagon advisory group. His resignation came two weeks after allegations by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker that Perle used his position as Pentagon adviser to try to profit from the war in Iraq.

In the Hersh article, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador, accuses Perle, a longtime critic of Saudi Arabia, of trying to blackmail his government. "Here he (Perle) is," said Bandar, "on the one hand trying to make a hundred million dollar deal, and on the other hand there were elements of the appearance of blackmail – if we get in business, he'll back off on Saudi Arabia."

Perle used his Pentagon position to lobby both for war and for turning postwar power in Iraq over to Ahmad Chalabi, the long-time Iraqi exile. Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, chief war supporters in the Bush Pentagon, had sponsored Chalabi since he set up the Iraqi National Council in 1992 to lobby for war.

Chalabi received $27 million from Congress for the express purpose of lobbying the Clinton administration – unsuccessfully – to go to war against Iraq. Chalabi and Perle got their war with Bush, though Chalabi was cut off by the Pentagon last May when it was determined the information he provided was both misleading and useless.

Perle's conflicts of interest and "nest feathering" have been known in foreign policy circles and pointed out in the media for years. Thanks to his official protectors, however, he has survived and thrived.

Thursday, 16 September 2004

Numerous writers have compared the Bush tactics with those used by Hitler, while others have documented the connection between Prescott Bush and the Nazis. However, there is much more to what has lead the Bush regime to transform the United Stated into a fascist police state. Few people are aware that it is the Republican Party which paid for Nazi broadcasts in the 1930s or that the GOP employed Nazis in election campaigns. Fewer are aware that Herbert Hoover conspired with top Nazi officials in Berlin to unseat Roosevelt in the 1940 election. Others have forgotten that George Bush senior as chairman of the Republican Party set up the ethnic heritage groups of the party as havens for former Nazis or that he employed known Nazi war criminals on his campaign staff.

Moreover, as the New York Republican convention nears convening, it is increasingly obvious that protestors will be dealt with brutally. New weapons such as a sound blaster developed for the military are already in place in New York blurring the lines between the military and civilian affairs. Over fifty protestors are being tightly watch and tailed, their only crime is their opposition to Bush. The Republican governor has suggested that free speech is not a right but a privilege that can be revoke. Additionally there is a massive operation going on in Florida and other states to deny Blacks their right to vote. Finally the Bush administration is using terror alerts to frighten voters and to condition them to the possibility of a canceled election. These and similar tactics are no different than the tactics Hitler's brown shirts employed.

There are numerous connections between the Bush family and the Nazis. Moreover, the philosophy of the neocons within the Bush administration has already been connected with fascism. However, no article has attempted to present an overview of the fascist connections within the Bush administration. This article will begin to outline the fascist connections between the present Bush administration and the Nazis, using a two-prong approach. The philosophical roots of Bush and the neocons can be traced back to one of America's notorious fascist.

Several authors have already noted the link between senior members of the Bush administration and the fascist Leo Strauss. However, exploring further the philosophical roots of Bush administration, we see that this connection leads back to the robber barons and the empire of J.P Morgan. Due to the natural congeniality between the robber barons and the corporate state of fascism, most of America's leading industrialists became America's leading supporters of fascism. They were responsible for bringing Hitler to power and for building Hitler's war machine.

Strauss is nominally portrayed as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. However, Strauss wasn't the hapless Jewish refugee that he is purported to be. Strauss adopted Zionism at the age of 17. There is a close and sinister association between Zionism and the Nazis. Many of the Zionists supported Hitler and the Nazis. In fact, the Nazis concluded a transfer agreement with the Zionists. The Zionists were attempting to limit the choices available for Europe's Jews to two choices: immigrate to Palestine or perish in the Holocaust.

As a student, Strauss began studying the philosophers that provided the basis for fascism: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt. He became a devoted lifelong follower of their philosophy. Strauss's philosophy and views became increasingly fascist as his studies progressed. The hallmark of Strauss's philosophy was his belief in totalitarian government. He rejected all principles of natural law and believed in keeping the masses ignorant and in general servitude.

Strauss left Nazi Germany with the warm commendation of the Nazi jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt. Schmitt was personally responsible, in 1934, for arranging a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship for Strauss, which enabled him to leave Germany, to study first in France and then England. He arrived in the United States from Britain in the fall of 1937. Briefly appointed Research Fellow in the Department of History of Columbia University, he then became a member of the graduate faculty at the New School for Social Research in 1938.

The New School of Social Research was founded in 1919, a year after Willard Straight's death from influenza. Straight had been a partner of J.P. Morgan. He believed that America's security depended upon the British fleet and that it was in the United States own interest to enter the war. At the same time, he saw the war as an opportunity for American bankers and industrialists to make substantial gains internationally at the expense of Britain. Morgan was an anglophile and believed in the entry of the U.S. in the war. In 1915, Straight left the Morgan empire for a position with the American International Corporation, itself affiliated with the National City Bank.

In 1914, Straight and his wife Dorothy (maiden name, Dorothy Payne Whitney) invited Herbert Croly to edit the first edition of the New Republic, a new magazine funded by Straight. During WWI, J.P. Morgan was obsessed with the media and endeavored to control it. Providing backing for the New Republic had a threefold purpose for Morgan. Firstly, it would keep him abreast of the thinking in left-wing circles. He even had an inside man in the communist press. Secondly, Morgan believed a magazine such as the New Republic allowed the left to blow off steam, thus acting as a safety valve. Finally, he also believed it would give him a power of veto on any actions originated by the left, in case they ever went radical.

Funding the New Republic was not the only effort funded by Morgan to gain control of the press. In 1915, he got together 12 leading men within the newspaper business and commissioned them to determine how one could control the national press. They agreed that, to control the national press, all that was needed was to control 25 of the most influential papers. Morgan immediately sent emissaries to purchase the editorial policy of the 25 selected papers. Morgan also used his money to form the American Legion and to craft it into a union busting and redbaiting group of hired thugs that ran amok during the 1919 Red Scare terrorizing and murdering countless union leaders and leftists.

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) was another Morgan front group aimed at controlling the American people. The CFR evolved out of the Rhodes Roundtable group during WWI. Most of the early members were Morgan employees who had met their English counterparts during the Paris Peace Conference. The CFR was a bridging group between the Morgans and the Rockefellers, and the Rockefellers provided much of the financial support. As the Rockefeller fortune came to outgrow the Morgan fortune, the CFR became more dominated by the Rockefellers. Percy Rockefeller, a Skull and Bones member who served on the board of the Morgan Guaranty Trust further strengthened the bridge between the Morgan and Rockefeller dynasties.

The New Republic certainly fits the blueprint of Morgan's efforts to control the media. Initially, all outside contributions had to be unanimously approved by its editorial board. The New School for Social Research followed in the footsteps of the New Republic. Straight's widow and the wife of another J.P. Morgan partner, Mrs. Thomas Lamont, were instrumental in establishing the New School. Two years later in 1921, Alvin Johnson, the assistant editor of the New Republic was named Director of the New School. Strauss remained at the Morgan-connected New School for Social Research for ten years. In 1948, he accepted a position at the Rockefeller founded University of Chicago.

Not only was Strauss a promoter of fascist ideology, but his entry into the United States and his work there through most of his life was supported financially by two of the most powerful American fascist families. While the dealings of the Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil Company with the Nazis during the war allowed the family the thin pretense that they were not personally involved, other actions by the Rockefeller family confirm their fascist ideology. It was the Rockefeller Foundation that provided funding for much of the Nazi research into eugenics, including the funding for the twin research conducted in the concentration camps by Mengele.

Strauss's connections to the neo-cons within the Bush administration are well known at this point. Numerous other neo-cons serving in the Bush administration or the American Enterprise Organization, who funded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), were students and followers of Strauss. Not only can this be seen in their dictatorial approach but it is also visible in their strong pro-Israeli views. An interesting aspect of Strauss's tenure at the University of Chicago is that it is during his tenure that both David Rockefeller and John Ashcroft received their degrees from the University of Chicago.

The Rockefeller family played a key role not only in funding Strauss but also in destroying the economies of Third World nations. The Rockefellers have used the University of Chicago and their various family foundations to promote an economic policy of ruin. The laissez-faire economics promoted by the Chicago school has failed numerous times in the past and was one of the leading causes of the 1929 stock market crash and resulting Great Depression. Such economic policies only lead to global fascism and corporate rule, which are the prime goal of the Rockefeller family.

This is evident in David Rockefeller's support of free trade agreements, the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. These trade organization and agreements have impoverished much of the Southern Hemisphere with their draconian demands for privatization and cuts in social spending. Moreover, these trade agreements effectively reduce the government's role to that of an enforcer of corporate policies. All of these free trade agreements contain a clause setting up a tribunal comprised of corporations to settle all disputes, including claims against the government. The clause effectively bypasses the court systems in signatory countries. In effect, these clauses confer supreme sovereignty to multinational corporations who answer to no one. Under these clauses, corporations are free to claim environmental laws, labor laws and other laws are harmful to the company and cause it financial loss, which results in massive settlements against the government and in the overturning of needed laws.

One of the chief advocates of these free trade agreements is Dick Cheney, who has promised David Rockefeller that he would deliver a hemisphere trade agreement before the end of the current Bush administration.

Such unconstitutional trade agreements have become commonplace as a result of the Rockefellers' ability to control and direct economic thought in the United States. In essence, the Rockefellers maintain a monopoly on economic theory. To understand how they gained such control brings us back to the 1920s. During the 1920s, two economists rose to prominence: Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich A. Hayek. Both were helped by Rockefeller money. Von Mises toured the United States in 1926. The tour of American Universities was sponsored by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation and was greatly successful in promoting the views of the Austrian School of Economics. Hayek tutored personally David Rockefeller in economics.

In 1950, von Hayek was brought to the United States to teach at the University of Chicago. He didn't teach economics, he was actually made a professor on the Committee on Social Thought. This was an exceptionally dangerous position for a man that held the views von Hayek did. In 1945, von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom was published. This poorly written book was an attack on the concept of the nation-state. In it, von Hayek argued that the nation-state was a hindrance to peace, and socialism led to totalitarian systems, which treated their citizens as serfs. In place of the nation-state von Hayek proposed a supra-national authority or world federation consisting of the financial elite.

This elite would then be free to rule the world according to their own interest. In 1947, von Hayek created the Mount Pelerin Society, made up of the financial elite of Europe, as a first step toward his supranational authority. In the years since, the Mount Perlin Society has been influential in creating numerous "conservative" think tanks, which promote free market economic policies for the Establishment. The society has expanded to include the following think tanks: the Heritage Foundation in 1973, the Fraser Institute in 1974, the Manhattan Institute in 1977, and the Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research in 1978.

The influence of the Chicago University on modern economics is unprecedented. Since 1969, most of the Nobel prizes in economics have been awarded to the free traders, despite the spectacular failures of laissez-faire economies.

Economists who dare publish articles opposing the thought of the Chicago University, are quickly ridiculed, their works dismissed, and their careers wrecked. All this is a testimony to the power of the Rockefeller family and its control over economy and free thought.

The connection between the University of Chicago and fascism was renewed in the 1960s under Pinochet in Chile. It was the "boys from Chicago", students of Milton Friedman, who destroyed the economy and reduced the citizens to serfdom in Pinochet's fascist Chile, where dissent was eliminated by right-wing death squads.

According to von Hayek's views, corporations are given the status of sovereign nations while the nation-states are reduced to mere quislings of the corporate state and enforcer of their laws. This is the same agenda as that of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary fund and the many so-called "free trade agreements." Many of the Bush neocons are further linked with von Hayek by their beliefs in Mandeville. (Von Hayek rejected the idea that man was created in the image of god and traced his philosophical ancestry to the early eighteenth century Satanist, Bernard Mandeville.)

At this point, it becomes clear that the Bush administration's philosophical roots are clearly grounded in fascist ideology and in the fascist dogma of the corporate state. That these roots come from two of America's richest families confirms fascism as a top-down revolution by the elite to maintain their control and power. The fascist roots of the Bush regime are manifested in the operative side of its philosophy, through the Psychological Strategy Board under Nelson Rockefeller. C D Jackson served in the Eisenhower administration; he was in charge of the psychological warfare. Both Bruce and Howell Jackson were part of the PNAC project, the blueprint for the Bush regime.

A return to the partners of J.P Morgan provides the operative connection between the Bush administration and fascism. Thomas Lamont was a prominent figure in the 1934 fascist plot to remove Roosevelt from office. The plot called for retired Marine General Smedley Butler to lead the force --much of it consisting of American Legionnaires-- to take over the White House. Roosevelt would be given a chance to step down and to cooperate with the plotters. If Roosevelt refused to let the business leaders seize power, then the plotters would kill him.

However, Butler was an honorable man, and he leaked the information concerning the plot to Roosevelt. Roosevelt knew he could not simply dismiss it when it was connected with several leading industrialists and bankers. To foil the plot, Roosevelt leaked information about it to the press. The resulting commotion in the front pages of the country's newspapers undermined any efforts by the plotters to proceed.

Butler described his military career as follows.

"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses…. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."

A third partner of J. P. Morgan, Henry Davison, financed the Yale Aviation Club, of which his son Trubee was a member. Many of the Aviation Club members were also members of the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale. The club gained fame during WWI. Robert Lovett led the unit during the war. Artemus Gates was another member. Trubee was injured in a crash during training and never saw combat.

The most interesting aspect of this group of college aviation buffs is how many of them later served in WWII on the targeting selection committee. Henry Simpson, Secretary of War and a former Bonesman, appointed John McCloy as his Assistant Secretary of War in charge of intelligence. Robert Lovett was appointed Assistant Secretary of War for air. Directly under Lovett was Trubee Davison. Davison held the position of assistant chief of staff at A-1. Artemus Gates served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy for air. James Stillman Rockefeller served with the Airborne Command and Airborne Center as assistant chief of staff.

Clearly the Department of War, and particularly the command for air had an unusually high number of members from the Yale Aviation Unit and the Skull and Bones. Moreover, these individuals all had extensive ties to Wall Street firms, which had a history of doing business with the Nazis. Certainly they were able to influence the target selection in the air campaign against Germany. Lovett was a lifelong advocate of what amounts to terror bombing, the bombing of civilian centers.

The air campaign against Germany left eighty percent of the homes destroyed. Factory production was only reduced by twenty percent. However, much of the reduction in factory production came about not by damage to the factories, but from delays and shortages of parts caused by the disruption of the transportation system from bombing damage. For example, Cologne was a city targeted for massive bombing attacks. While the city lay in ruins, the Ford and I.G. Farben plants escaped all but minor bomb damage. In Berlin, a city that had been reduced to rubble from the bombing campaign, the Allies chose the I.G. Farben building for their headquarters. It had escaped all but minor damage from the bombs.

Robert Lovett and Prescott Bush were both Bonesmen employed by Brown Brothers and Harriman. In fact, many of the top directors and partners of Brown Brothers & Harriman were Bonesmen. It was one of the main firms on Wall Street to have extensive dealings with the Nazis.

The deals with the Nazis were so extensive at Brown Brothers & Harriman that Prescott Bush had 23 firms seized from him for trading with the enemy. Five firms were seized from Bush in 1942, another 18 firms were seized shortly after the war. The 18 firms had been allowed to operate during the war only because seizing them had been judged detrimental to the war effort and their continued operation posed little risk to the Allies.

Before the firms were seized, Prescott Bush hired the Dulles brothers to conceal the Nazi ownership in these firms. Any window of deniability slammed shut the minute Bush hired the Dulles brothers to conceal the Nazi's ownership. This is when it becomes treason by both Bush and the Dulles brothers. It confirms that both parties knew that the continued operation of these companies was in violation of U.S. policy and of the Trading with the Enemy Act. Moreover, it confirms that both parties freely chose to aid the Nazis when the U.S. was at war with Nazi Germany.

The Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell employed both John Foster and Allan Dulles. Throughout the 1930s and the early 1940s, the Dulles brothers were busy cloaking Nazi ownership of numerous corporations and their cartel arrangements with I.G. Farben. Not only was their work treasonous in and of itself, it also delayed the production of war materials and munitions.

Aside from his 23 corporations seized for violating the Trading with the Enemy Act, Prescott Bush was a leader in the American eugenic movement. The American eugenic movement was successful in the passage of sterilization laws in many states for anyone judged unfit. These laws served as the basis of the Nuremberg Laws passed by the Nazis. Much of the Nazi eugenic research was funded, even during the war, with money from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation. The Harriman's were also large financial backers of the movement.

After the war, John Foster Dulles, with the aid of Rockefeller money, led a world tour of third-world nations stressing the danger of population expansion of nonAryan races. George Bush, Prescott's son, has followed in his father's footsteps in setting up population control in third-world nations through the UN. In his first political race, George Bush campaigned against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and as a member of congress he warned of the danger of too many Black babies. While population control may be a laudable goal, in the hands of the Bush family it becomes another eugenic tool aimed at eliminating nonAryan races.

Moreover, Cold Springs Harbor, the center of eugenic research in the 1920s and 1930s is still operating. It is currently a leader of the human genome project. While the genome project will undoubtedly provide many future medical benefits, Cold Springs remains firmly under the control of the same families involved in the American eugenics movement. Current directors William Gerry and Allen Dulles Jebsen are the grandsons of Harriman and Allan Dulles respectively.

The genome project provides the ideal cover to develop a genome-specific bioweapon, a weapon with the sole purpose of committing genocide on a massive scale. Such a weapon has been described by the PNAC as a politically useful tool. The PNAC is the road map George W. Bush is following as a "War President."

This is not the only link between the Rockefeller Foundation and questionable programs. In 1931, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads infected human subjects with cancer cells. Rhoads later established the U.S. Army Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah, and Panama. It was named the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. While there, he began a series of radiation exposure experiments on American soldiers and civilian hospital patients.

Following the war, Allan Dulles faced an investigation for treason. While Dulles was crafty enough to escape the charges, one of those aiding him in covering up his crimes was Richard Nixon. While still serving in the navy, Nixon was given some captured documents to review. The contents would have revealed Allan Dulles as a traitor. In exchange for burying the documents Dulles agreed to fund Nixon's first political campaign. Nixon's campaign benefited from large contributions from a large New York bank connected with Brown Brothers and Harriman.

Captured Nazi documents reveal they had a comeback plan. Their plan to regain power after the war revolved around using their friends or other fascist sympathizers in other countries --and particularly in the United States-- to do their bidding while rebuilding Germany. The documents note that, as late as 1944, the Nazis were hoping for a Republican victory in the presidential election because they would get an easier peace. The second part of their plan aimed at provoking a war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which would allow the Nazis to retake power in Germany without U.S. intervention.

Politically, Eisenhower had a tin ear, and he was politically naïve. When John Foster Dulles approached him in Europe to run for election in 1948, Eisenhower had no foreign policy concept formulated. He was easily swayed by Dulles' idea of massive nuclear retaliation, which led to the appointment of Dulles as secretary of state. While Eisenhower was no Nazi and expressed his hatred of Nazis and Germans in his letters to his wife, he allowed the American Nazis like the Dulles brothers to gain a great deal of control over his administration. Eisenhower appointed Allan Dulles as CIA Director, and Prescott Bush and John Lovett were Eisenhower's close golfing buddies. Prescott Bush was also the driving force in selecting Richard Nixon as Eisenhower's running mate. Nelson Rockefeller was appointed to head the Psychological Strategy Board. Numerous employees of Sullivan and Cromwell, the two Wall Street firms most involved with the Nazis, held important positions within the administration.

John McCloy and General Draper, both from the former Control Council of Germany, fulfilled important roles in the Eisenhower administration. Nothing was left to chance in the rebirth of the Nazis. In postwar Germany, the three most powerful figures: John McCloy head of the Control Council, Lewis Douglas, the head of the Finance Division of the Control Council and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, were all brothers-in-law. They all had wed daughters of Fredrick Zinsser, a partner of JP Morgan.

While the American Nazis succeeded in gaining partial control of the Eisenhower administration and were able to stoke the fires of the Cold War, they failed to secure total control. Although these American Nazis managed to dupe the tired old general, they never succeeded in completely tricking him. Even after suffering a debilitating heart attack the old general refused to turn over the reins of power to Nixon, a man he loathed. Before leaving office, Eisenhower realized he had been duped and left us his rather cryptic warning about the military-industrial complex, suggesting the dangers of corporate rule.

Since 1960, Eisenhower's warning has gone largely unheeded. Beginning with the rise of fascism and the elitism within the Reagan administration, the military keeps taking up a bigger portion of the budget, social welfare has been largely eliminated --just as it was eliminated in Nazi Germany. Today, under the regime of George W. Bush, it is clear that the corporations within the military-industrial complex are in control of the country. It allows Dick Cheney to pad his retirement account at Halliburton with millions of dollars of Halliburton overcharges for services not delivered in the Iraq War. Meanwhile, many of the soldiers are sent into combat without body armor.

A recently disclosed top-secret document from the NSC reveals that the NSC staff were instructed to cooperate fully with Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force as it considered the "melding" of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies towards rogue states," such as Iraq, and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields." The document suggests that Cheney's Energy Task Force was actually a discussion for geostrategic plans for oil, putting the issue of war in the context of the captains of the oil industry sitting down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans. This would confirm Bush's plans for regime change in 60 countries and his support for rebel forces opposing the democratic government of Venezuela as well as the increasing hostility of the Bush administration towards Iran.

Too many people still believe that fascism can't happen here. It is happening here today. The Gestapo is firmly in place in the form of Ashcroft's justice department. The FBI no longer serves to protect the citizens; instead it is being used to protect this regime, by such means as the gagging of Sibel Edmonds, for instance. The FBI is no longer primarily charged with criminal investigation instead its being used to enforce this regime's policies and finally the FBI, other federal law enforcement agencies and the military are illegally spying on anyone opposed to this regime. Moreover, Representative Porter Goss, Bush's choice to head the CIA has introduced legislation that would allow the CIA to conduct operations inside the United States including arbitrary arrests of American citizens.

Ike's military-industrial complex, the PNAC document, the World Trade Organization, free trade agreements, and the George W. Bush regime are all parts of the many-headed Nazi Hydra in America.

If George Bush declares a red alert or martial law or manages to steal another election, will you be one of the first sent to the concentration camps? Will you go quietly like a lamb? Will you allow the Gestapo to haul away your neighbor, your wife, your son or daughter? Will you live next to the crematories with your head in the sand as the Germans did? Or will you oppose the regime and help reestablish the constitutional republic?

The time to decide is now, tomorrow may be too late. The corporate state of fascism has risen from the ashes of 9/11 like a giant phoenix. It will consume all that opposes it. The Fourth Reich has risen. Beware. Your life and freedoms depend on it.

For greater details into these connections and others and complete documentation click the link below to the Nazi Hydra in America.

This is the first article in a series on the misunderstood and misjudged role of American Zionism in the question of Palestine. In my opinion, the role of organised Zionist groups and activities in the United States has not been sufficiently addressed during the period of the "peace process," a neglect that I find absolutely astonishing, given that Palestinian policy has been essentially to throw our fate as a people in the lap of the United States without any strategic awareness of how US policy is in effect dominated, if not completely controlled, by a small minority of people whose views about Middle East peace are in some way more extreme than even those of the Israeli Likud.

Let me give a small example. A month ago, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz sent over a leading columnist of theirs, Ari Shavit, to spend several days talking with me; a good summary of this long conversation appeared as a question-and-answer interview in the August 18 issue of the newspaper's supplement, basically uncut and uncensored. I voiced my views very candidly, with a major emphasis on right of return, the events of 1948, and Israel's responsibility for all this. I was surprised that my views were presented just as I voiced them, without the slightest editorialising by Shavit, whose questions were always courteous and un-confrontational.

A week after the interview there was a response to it by Meron Benvenisti, ex-deputy mayor of Jerusalem under Teddy Kollek. It was disgustingly personal, full of insults and slander against me and my family. But he never denied that there was a Palestinian people, or that we were driven out in 1948. In fact he said, we conquered them, and why should we feel guilty? I responded to Benvenisti a week later in Ha'aretz: What I wrote was also published uncut. I reminded Israeli readers that Benvenisti was responsible for the destruction (and probably knew about the killing of several Palestinians) of Haret Al-Magharibah in 1967, in which several hundred Palestinians lost their homes to Israeli bulldozers. But I did not have to remind Benvenisti or Ha'aretz readers that as a people we existed and could at least debate our right of return. That was taken for granted.

Two points here. One is that the whole interview could not have appeared in any American paper, and certainly not in any Jewish-American journal. And if there had been an interview the questions to me would have been adversarial, hectoring, insulting, such as, why have you been involved in terrorism, why will you not recognise Israel, why was Hajj Amin a Nazi, and so on. Second, a right-wing Israeli Zionist like Benvenisti, no matter how much he may detest me or my views, would not deny that there is a Palestinian people which was forced to leave in 1948. An American Zionist for a long time would say that no conquest took place or, as Joan Peters alleged in a now-disappeared and all but forgotten 1984 book, From Time Immemorial (that won all the Jewish awards when it appeared here), there were no Palestinians with a life in Palestine before 1948.

Every Israeli will readily admit and knows perfectly well that all of Israel was once Palestine, that (as Moshe Dayan said openly in 1976) every Israeli town or village once had an Arab name. And Benvenisti says openly that "we" conquered, and so what? Why should we feel guilty about winning? American Zionist discourse is never straight out honest that way: it must always go round and talk about making the desert bloom, and Israeli democracy, etc., completely avoiding the essential facts about 1948, which every Israeli has actually lived. For the American, these are mostly fantasies, or myths, not realities. So removed from the actualities are American supporters of Israel, so caught in the contradictions of diasporic guilt (after all what does it mean to be a Zionist and not emigrate to Israel?) and triumphalism as the most successful and most powerful minority in the US, that what emerges is very often a frightening mixture of vicarious violence against Arabs and a deep fear and hatred of them, which is the result, unlike Israeli Jews, of not having any sustained direct contact with them.

For the American Zionist, therefore, Arabs are not real beings, but fantasies of nearly everything that can be demonised and despised, terrorism and anti-Semitism most specially. I recently received a letter from a former student of mine, who has had the benefit of the finest education available in the United States: he can still bring himself to ask me in all honesty and courtesy why as a Palestinian I let a Nazi like Hajj Amin still determine my political agenda. "Before Hajj Amin," he argued, "Jerusalem wasn't important to Arabs. Because he was so evil he made it an important issue for Arabs just in order to frustrate Zionist aspirations which always held Jerusalem to be important." This is not the logic of someone who has lived with and knows something concrete about Arabs. It is that of a person who speaks an organised discourse and is driven by an ideology that regards Arabs only as negative functions, as the embodiment of violent anti-Semitic violent passions. As such, therefore, they are to be fought against and if possible disposed of. Not for nothing was Dr Baruch Goldstein, the appalling murderer of 29 Palestinians who were quietly praying in the Hebron mosque, an American, as was Rabbi Meir Kahane. Far from being aberrations that have embarrassed their followers, both Kahane and Goldstein are revered today by others like them. Many of the most zealous far-right settlers sitting on Palestinian land, remorselessly speaking about "the land of Israel" as being theirs, hating and ignoring the Palestinian owners and residents all round them, are also American-born. To see them walking through the streets of Hebron as if the Arab city was entirely theirs is a frightening sight, aggravated by the defiance and contempt they display openly against the Arab majority.

I bring all this up here to make one essential point. When after the Gulf War the PLO took the strategic decision -- already settled on by two major Arab countries before the PLO -- to work with the American government and if possible with the powerful lobby that controls discussion of Middle Eastern politics, they had made the decision (as had the two Arab states before them) on the basis of vast ignorance and quite extraordinarily mistaken assumptions. The idea, as it was expressed to me shortly after 1967 by a senior Arab diplomat, was to surrender in effect, and say, we are not going to struggle any more. We are now willing to accept Israel and also to accept the US's determining role in our future. There were objective reasons for such a view at the time, as there are now, as to why continuing the fight as the Arabs had done historically would lead to further defeat and even disaster. But I firmly believe that it was a mistaken policy simply to throw Arab policy into the lap of the US and, since the major Zionist organisations are so influential everywhere in the United States, into their lap as well, saying, in effect, we won't fight you, let us join you, but please treat us well. The hope was that if we conceded and said, we are not your enemies, as Arabs we would become their friends.

The problem is with the disparity in power that remained. From the viewpoint of the powerful, what difference does it make to your own strategy if your weak adversary gives up and says I have nothing further to fight for, take me, I want to be your ally, just try to understand me a bit better and then perhaps you will then be fairer? A good way of answering this question in practical and concrete terms is to look at the latest turn of events in New York's senatorial race, where Hillary Clinton is competing with Republican Ric Lazio for the seat now held by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D), who is retiring. Last year Hillary said that she favoured the establishment of a Palestinian state and, on a formal visit to Gaza with her husband, embraced Soha Arafat. Since entering the senatorial race in New York she has outdone even the most right-wing Zionists in her fervour for Israel and opposition to Palestine, even going so far as to advocate moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and (more extreme) advocating leniency for Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy convicted for espionage against the US and now serving a life sentence. Her Republican antagonists have tried to embarrass her by depicting her as an "Arab-lover" and by releasing a photograph of her actually embracing Soha. Since New York is the citadel of Zionist power, attacking someone with such labels as "Arab-lover" and "friend of Soha Arafat" is tantamount to the worst possible insult. All this despite the fact that Arafat and the PLO are openly declared American allies, recipients of US military and financial aid, and in the security field the beneficiaries of CIA security support. In the meantime, the White House released a photo of Lazio shaking hands two years ago with Arafat. One blow clearly deserves another.

The real fact is that Zionist discourse is a discourse of power, and Arabs in that discourse are the objects of power -- despised objects at that. Having thrown in their lot with this power as its surrendered former antagonist, they can never expect to be on equal terms with it. Hence the degrading and insulting spectacle of Arafat (always and forever the symbol of enmity to the Zionist mind) being used in an entirely local contest in the US between two opponents who are trying to prove who of the two is the most pro-Israeli. And neither Hillary Clinton nor Ric Lazio is even Jewish.

Wednesday, 15 September 2004

The plea-bargains that lawyers for Rick and Rosalie Ames arranged with the Justice Department on April 28, 1994 for their spying for the Soviets, coupled with the White House's most fulsome endorsement of the just deceased Richard Nixon's alleged contributions to American security, seemed to have solved both the CIA's and President Clinton's most pressing needs, ones traced back to the culmination of the Iran-Contra scandal. They both were most concerned about details regarding Operation Tree, the assassination of Sweden's Olof Palme in Stockholm on February 28, 1986, coming out - what Ames's spying had helped prevent becoming a nuclear showdown with Moscow (Operation Armageddon), and what the unsolved murder of leading suspect in the shooting, Viktor Gunnarsson, in North Carolina the previous December made most threatening. Rick's spying had to be downsized, and disposed of as quickly as possible.

No sooner had Clinton given a most generous assessment of Tricky Dick's accomplishments in the international arena in his eulogy at the Yorba Linda, California burial than the Agency allowed the Ameses in Washington to continue to spin their own tale about the spying in court - one which stressed their apparent delusions, cynicism, and expediency in what they had done. In the process, Clinton gave his due to the mentor who had gotten him out of the jams he had brought with him from Arkansas, and which had only festered in the White House, while the CIA was preparing the way for avoiding its own demise.

Ames had been given this unprecedented liberty with the press long before the hearing, so that he could spread deceptions which would most work in the Agency's favor. Believing that he would never tell why he had actually done what he did - fear that the double agent Operation Courtship setting up the Soviets to take the fall could well lead to Moscow winning the Cold War or at least achieve a deadly draw if it was allowed to proceed - and overseeing what he was saying so that he could be reined in if he tried, he discussed his spying in just the ways his reluctant mole hunters wanted. It was as if the operation had never moved beyond trying to catch Soviet spies stealing secrets from America, while CIA's in the USSR were suffering the same outcomes - the old spying game which employed many, and cost great sums but never really accomplished much of anything.

It is hard to imagine a more brazen plea for clemency than what Ames addressed to the court before the judge handed down his sentence of life in prison without a chance for parole, as The Washington Post reported on April 29, 1994: "These spy wars are a sideshow, which have no real impact on our significant security interests over the years." In explaining that his spying had not really affected the course of the Cold War for either side, concluding that the process should be scrapped, he declined to say what his efforts had accomplished in the case of individual spies. About his performance, James Adams added in Sellout: "As was the case throughout his interrogation, Ames showed no remorse for his actions and seemed remarkably relaxed about his role as one of the most successful mass murderers in history." (p. 237)

Instead of Ames's cool demeanor being explained in terms of the growing need of reforming the intelligence community, especially CIA's role, as Adams attempted, it was because he knew that the Agency would not be so foolhardy as to attempt to throw the book at him. If it had, he would have explained before a full, jury trial what CIA was attempting with double agents Sergei Motorin, Valeri Martynov, Boris Yushin, and others at Moscow's expense after the Stockholm shooting - making it look as if the assassin was working for the Soviets, Moscow had been taken completely by surprise by the shooting, the Red Banner Fleet, especially its nuclear and killer submarines, was hurriedly taking to sea to protect the USSR against a feared NATO first strike, and the like.

As it was, Assistant U. S. Attorney Mark J. Hulkower treated the court to the benefits - living in a half-million dollar house, having vast sums of money stashed away somewhere, and a driving a fancy Jaguar - that Rick had enjoyed while his counterparts working for Washington had generally received the ultimate punishment from the KGB, execution by firing squad. "These are crimes which caused people to die, as surely as if the defendant pulled the trigger." (Ibid.) Hulkower, however, never explained why Washington was not prepared to pull the switch on Ames.

The court was spared from learning that Motorin had picked up mere trifles in return - a favorable insurance adjustment for an auto accident while entertaining a hooker, temporary possession of a wedding ring for one of his lovers, small sums every time he visited his handler, and increasinglylarger amounts in an escrow account when he went back to the USSR. Yuzhin received similar sums, along with a gold cigarette lighter which almost got him executed when the KGB discovered that it also contained a miniature camera which had helped imprison Norwegian spy in NATO, Arne Treholt, for stealing secrets. (David Wise, Nightmover, pp. 260-1) Dimitri Polyakov, who Woolsey compared with the famous Oleg Gordievsky, got started with the FBI for only $600.

The purpose of mentioning these disparities is to show that the Agency was apparently providing good results for the money - what Woolsey took immediate advantage of before anyone had time to discover otherwise. Since the KGB was willing to pay Ames all kinds of money for CIA secrets, it must have been doing a fabulous job, an operation which could only have been disclosed to Moscow by a most clever, cynical agent. It was only later that we learned that the Soviets kept paying Ames for helping prevent the USSR, and most probably the rest of the world, from needlessly being destroyed. If the American public had learned this, the Agency would have been finished.

Given CIA failure to keep the Bureau informed of all kinds of counterintelligence cases, especially Ames's espionage, it was hardly surprising that the Senate Intelligence Committee drafted an act to give the FBI overall responsibility in such cases in future. On the day before Nixon died, Woolsey and Committee Chairman Senator Dennis DeConcini got into a shouting match over the suggested change, the DCI exclaiming: "What you want to do, Senator, is go back to J. Edgar Hoover wanting to control CIA!" (Quoted from Mark Riebling, Wedge, p. 448.)

After Woolsey and DeConcini took their dispute to the airwaves, and the DCI and FBI Director Louis Freeh were scheduled to have a showdown on the issue before DeConcini's committee, Clinton signed a last-minute executive order - thanks to input by intermediary NSA Tony Lake - settling the issue, and quite possibly saving the Agency. A Bureau man would be put in charge of the CIA's new Counterintelligence Center (CIC), and other procedures and bodies were established to prevent future Ames cases. After a comestic show of peace and reconciliation by the Directors before the committee, DeConcini's proposal died.

Little did I realize that I had now come into the picture by writing a most angry letter to the President about his eulogy for Nixon. While I had fled America in 1989, as I indicated in my confession articles about being an exile, and a target of its secret state, I did not realize that I was recreating the pattern which led to Washington attorney Paul Wilcher's murder. He had become completely involved in the problems of his client, Gunther Karl Russbacker, allegedly one of the pilots who helped ferry Vice President Bush's people to Paris in 1980 to arrange the 'October Surprise'. Ultimately, Wilcher became involved in the 1991 alleged suicide of whistleblower Danny Casolaro, who was threatening to expose all sorts of Reagan covert operations aka the 'Octopus' cabal, and wrote to Congressman Lee Hamilton of the Joint Task Force investigating the 'October Surprise' allegation on May 22, 1992.

By May 1993, Wilcher had gotten up more dirt on the cabal, and had written a 100-page letter to Attorney General Janet Reno about it, complaining that Reagan administraion appointees in the Department were preventing its investigation. Attorney Linda Thompson added this information to the charges: "Recent revelations about the Clintons' bank dealings in Arkansas tie directly to the gun and drug running out of Mena, Arkansas, by way of the Arkansas Development Finance Authority." On June 11th, Wilcher was interviewed by JD officials, and ten days later, he was found dead, sitting on the toilet in his apartment, apparently the victim of ricin poisoning.

When the police mounted no murder inquiry into his death, merely allowing the CIA and FBI strip his apartment of any possible damaging information, Garby Leon, a Harvard Ph.D., and an official of Columbia Pictures, apparently looking into a possible film on the subject, wrote three weeks later to Reno, complaining of the inaction, and concluding thus: "Anyone inspired to follow Casolaro or Wilcher's path now has a strong added reason to fear doing so." Still, no official action was taken on Wilcher's apparent murder, thanks to added input, it seems, by Clinton appointees, especially Reno's deputy, Clinton crony Webster Hubbell.

I was unaware of any of this when I wrote to Clinton on April 30, 1994 - just after the most pressing problems for him and CIA had apparently been resolved. At Nixon's burial, Clinton had been inclined to speak of the former President as a great statesman, struck down needlessly by his mean-spirited enemies, but George Stephanopoulous, as he explained in All too Human, talked hin out of it: "He tinkered with Clinton's eulogy at Richard Nixon's funeral to make sure it wouldn't upset liberals." The speech was still too generous about Nixon's temporary, foreign accomplishments for conservatives, as William Bundy explained in A Tangled Web for both Presidents' benefit.

You can imagine Clinton's reaction when I wrote thus about his just deceased mentor:

Dear President Clinton,

I have postponed writing you for a week in the vain hope that events would ultimately prove one unnecessary, but they have just compounded my anger and dismay. I am referring to the support the United States provided, and the testaments you gave to former President Richard M. Nixon upon his death. Mr Nixon was undoubtedly one of the worst Presidents the country ever had, and it is simply disgusting for you to try to make out that he was one of the best. That is just what Howard Hunt's Plumbers' Unit and all the people who tried to cover up the Watergate break-in wanted from you. It is a slap in the face to all the people who worked so hard and with such difficulty to establish what a felon Nixon was, and to see that he was removed from office.

I do not say this as an original Nixon hater, but as one who after years of serious study has concluded that Tricky Dick was even worse than we thought. Rather than be taken in by his adoption of the Charles Colson gambit to achieve his rehabilitation, we should be looking into the real causes of Watergate, and why did Nixon do so many felonious acts to try to cover it up, what President Ford, despite his promises to the contrary, pardoned. "The Bay of Pig thing" that Nixon was willing to pay a million dollars in hush money to Howard Hunt was a reference to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, what people like Hunt, Richard Helms of the CIA, J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, Alexander Haig of the DOD, politicians Nixon and John Connally had organized with various Maifa hitmen to rectify the original invasion. It was only because of Connally's wounding that the plan to blame Castro for the President's assassination did not go ahead, leading to a most ad hoc solution to the crime. Without Connally's wounding, we would have had a resumption of the Cuban Missile Crisis, resulting quite probably in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

In sum, rather than spend good taxpayer money to try to polish up this most terrible President, you should have the Attorney General look into his earlier crimes, or appoint a new commission to determine what really happened to JFK and the country in Dallas. If you want further massive evidence on these matters, I would be happy to oblige.

Sincerely yours, Trowbridge H. Ford, Ph.D.

Of course, this letter put me on a collision course with Washington's covert government - what I made even more imminent by replying angrily to a letter I received in July from Ms. Jennifer Caplan of Milledgeville, Georgia, trying to get me to state that the forged FBI memo regarding Jack Ruby having worked with Nixon when he was on the House Un-American Activities Committee back in the late 1940s was genuine. (For more this, see my articles about being a teacher, and an exile in the Archives.) She had written the previous July, but it was only forwarded to me by my publisher, Barry Rose, a year later. In my reply to Ms. Caplan, I made it crystal clear that the memo was a crude forgery which was being circulated just to discredit me - what Nixon, Helms, Haig, and their subordinates clearly sought.

Not one easily deterred, I wrote to Director Freeh the same day, outlining again for him the role the CIA's Helms, the Bureau, the Mafia, Haig, Ruby, Nixon, and others played in the Dallas assassination. On July 30, 1994, I took the dangerous step of writing to Attorney General Reno about what I had written to the Director - calling for an investigation of those conspirators still living, Helms, Haig, and Hunt - and complaining about not having received any confirmation of receipt of my request. Four weeks later, I wrote again to Reno, supplying an outline of the book I proposed to write about the Dallas conspiracy, and complaining that my criticisms about government performance, especially the Justice Department's Philip Heymann, in this matter only resulted in actions to hurt me - the Bureau opening an investigation of me, disinformation agents, like Jim Marrs and Jim DiEugenio, spreading disinformation to destroy my credibility, etc. I concluded that the government was really part of the problem rather than its solution, and that I would act accordingly in future.

On September 14, 1994, the JD's Mary C. Spearing, Chief of the General Litigation and Legal Advice Section, finally replied about all my correspondence. "The Attorney General's Office referred your letter to the Criminal Division for response." She particularly noted my hope "...that the Attorney General would 'expose and punish those guilty of treason in this most barbarous process.' " As for my conspiracy theory about the Dallas assassination, she stated that ones similar to mine had been adequately addressed by the Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and that I should consult its results for answers to my queries.

Of course, I was completely dissatisfied with Ms. Spearing's response, and wrote accordingly a week later, including yet another outline of the proposed book. The outline, I said, completely rejected the HSCA Report. I called her attention to the report that Representative Henry Gonzalez had asked me to write in anticipation of HSCA's creation, and noted that its expansion - what appeared in Tom Valentine's National Exchange in April, May, and June 1978 - had not even been mentioned in the Report's bibliography, copies of which I would be happy to supply her. "It is simply contemptible for you to lump all conspiracy theories together," I concluded, "and to act as if the Congressional publication dealt with mine."

I never heard anything more from the Department of Justice, at least in the way I anticipated. Ms. Spearing never wrote back, and there was never any response from its Criminal Division to me. Shortly thereafter, though, when I went to the States in December, as I have already indicated in my confessions article as an exile, Portuguese Immigration officials tried to force my leaving the country, thanks, I believe, to prodding by the Bureau's Legal Attaché at the American Embassy in Lisbon, and when this failed, American officials, under the leadership of the new ambassador to Portugal, Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, started seeking my demise by my unknowingly ingesting small amounts of ricin - what would make it seem as if I had died from an accident, or from natural causes.

The Smith Bagleys were close friends of the Clintons who had contributed much and worked hard for their success. They had almost as much at stake with the President's continued occupation of the Whie House as the Clintons. Elizabeth had been nominated for the post after I had made my complaints about Nixon et al. to Clinton crystal clear, and she had been confirmed in the summer by the Senate for the position, just in time to go after me.

While the White House was finally, it seems, getting rid of me - the biggest critic of the CIA - it still had the talkative Ames to deal with, and the problems surrounding the murder of Viktor Gunnarson, the prime suspect in the Stockholm shooting, were waiting in the wings if it ever hoped to convict former Salisbury policeman L. C. Underwood of the crime, as we shall see.

Since the Bush administration has decided to seek confirmation of Porter Goss, the retiring Republican Congressman from Florida's 14th Congressional District, as the next Director of Central Intelligence, the public should be made aware of his most damaging secrets, especially since the White House has pursued a most cynical course in gaining approval of his nomination.

One of the conventions of Congress is to approve the nomination of any of its members to a post requiring senatorial approval unless the candidate is notoriously corrupt, obviously unqualified or intensely disliked. It is to take advantage of this convention that the Goss nomination is being pursued since he had declined to run again in his district, and it is too late now to get on the Florida ballot. By waiting until the formation of the next Congress, Goss will then no longer be in a position to take advantage of the convention - what would promise a much more controversial confirmation process, especially if Bush retains the White House, no matter which political party controls the Senate after the November election. Goss is just too political in every aspect to succeed under these circumstances.

So the Bush administration, confident that it will be returned in two months, is going ahead with the nomination to take advantage of the current, special conditions, believing full well that, if confirmed now, Goss will continue as DCI next year. The gutless Senate Democrats are relying upon the electorate to do their work for them, and will only regret their failure to act, come January.

Given the qualifications, experience, and performance of all previous DCIs, it is hard to see how Goss can be stopped on these normal grounds. He is certainly well enough educated, has had a wide variety of experience, and has not performed politically, especially as Chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, in an overly partisan way too often. As a Congressman, an elected representative, he is expected to have policies, interests, and agendas that other politicians might neither approve of nor follow - what he has reminded the Senators of during the first day of hearings.

This leaves Goss's own experience as a CIA agent, starting right after he graduated from Yale, and the country was trying to recover from the ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation. In this context, it is most alarming for Goss, fluent in French and Spanish, and first serving the Agency in Miami, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, to have stated that he then ..."had some very interesting moments in the Florida Straits." During that time, after the forced resignations of DCI Allen Dulles and DDP Richard Bissell because of the fiasco, the Agency was insubordinate, bordering on treachery, of Kennedy administration orders, especially in operations involving the Florida Straits. Never was the CIA so out of control from constituted authority.

For example, when Attorney General Robert Kennedy was finally briefed on the Agency's efforts with the Mafia to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro - what MI5's Peter Wright had finally persuaded the CIA to initiate in 1959, and William King Harvey was trying to effect under codename ZR/RIFLE, part of the Cuban Task Force W for Operation Mongoose, working out of the Miami station - he was furious to learn from Lawrence Houston that the Agency was using Mafia hitmen because it threatened to ruin all his efforts to prosecute them. While Kennedy thought that the collaboration had finished, and had made clear that he would be informed before it was attempted again, Harvey, the new DDP Richard Helms, and Johnny Roselli, a lieutenant of Chicago Mafioso Sam 'Momo' Giancana - thanks again to Wright's encouragement in November 1961 (Peter Wright, Spycatcher, pp. 143-62) - were at it again.

"Phase two," Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen wrote in The 60 Greatest Conspiracies, "featured more poison pills, rifles, and explosives over the course of eleven more months - but all these plots failed as well....Neither Harvey nor Helms had informed CIA director McCone of Mafia phase two." (p. 17) And he, of course, had neither informed the President nor the Attorney General who only learned of Harvey's treachery when his commandos attacked Cuba during the tensest moments of the Cuban Missile Crisis, almost derailing diplomatic attempts to settle it peacefully.

While the Kennedys did everything they could to stop Harvey and his Cuban exiles, ultimately forcing his transfer to Rome, Harvey went ahead with his own plans against Cuba as if Washington didn't exist. In April 1963, Harvey was seen at Plantation Key, planning with his former subordinates, especially E. Howard Hunt, and William 'Rip' Robertson, new attacks on the island, again with the help of the Mafia's Roselli, John Martino, Eddie Perez aka "Bayo", and others, notably William Pawley. Pawley was closely connected to former Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and Life magazine's Henry Luce.

In June, the Martino mission took a Cuban assassination team in Pawley's boat, close along the Cuban coastline, dropping them off to make the hit, and hoping to make contact with two Soviet colonels, willing to claim that Moscow had not returned to the USSR all its missiles, as dictated by the terms of the settlement. But instead of the colonels being turned over to the government, as Peter Dale Scott has written in Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, they would give a press conference to prove that the Soviets were again threatening America, and that the Kennedy administration was doing nothing about it. ((pp. 115-6)

When these plans didn't work out, a CIA agent sneaked into Havana in September to reactivate Rolando Cubela aka AM/LASH to make another hit on Castro. To get Cubela on board, Demond Fitzgerald, Harvey's successor at Miami, claimed that he was the Attorney General's representative, and that Fizgerald was no mere operative but a real US Senator. While the Agency later disputed this audacity, claiming that Cubela initiated the operation, he convincingly denied the claims when Anthony Summers interviewed him while researching The Kennedy Conspiracy. (See, esp., pp. 322-4.)

Harvey et al. then decided to make AM/LASH a convenient fallguy for Castro's apparent effort to kill JFK himself while making Jack Ruby actually set up the real one. (For more on this, see my article about Harvey in the Archive.) What's really interesting is that their efforts in Miami opened the door for the actual assassination in Dallas - JFK was so threatened and protected in the Sunshire State that he promised to many, especially actress Joan Crawford, Nixon's employer at Pepsi-Cola, that he would take as many risks as possible when he visited Texas a few days later. Little wonder that Martino told his wife Florence this when he heard about the trip: "Flo, they're going to kill him. They're going to kill him when he gets to Dallas." (Quoted from Noel Twyman, Bloody Treason, p. 631.)

When JFK was setting out on the Texas trip, the most treacherous act of all by the CIA, and the least investigated occurred - the apparent shooting down by Castro of a U-2 reconnaissance plane, piloted by Captain Joe Glenn Hyde, Jr. The LaGrange (Ga.) Daily News, Hyde's home town, was filled withominous stories about the crash while reminding readers that similar flights had first discovered Soviet MRBMs in Cuba in October 1962, and that flights were continuing to make sure that they had left.

His mother, for example, said that he had called her on the 19th, to wish her a happy birthday from some undisclosed place, but now he had simply disappeared in the "Ten Fathom Curve" area, 40 miles northwest of Key West. While the Strategic Air Command (SAC) did not believe that Hyde had been shot down by the Cubans, it did note that the plane crashed without transmitting any radio messages, and that the downing of Major Rudolf Anderson's U-2 plane during the Missile Crisis took the world to the brink of nuclear war.

The day of the assassination, the Navy and Coast were conducting an all-out search to find Hyde who had apparently ejected from the aircraft before it crashed, and to recover the U-2. If Hyde had done so, it might take days to find him. "Strict security measures are in effect in the salvage area and newsmen are not permitted near the scene," the lead story of the Georgia daily reported. While neither mechanical trouble, nor Cuban fire had been ruled out as the cause of the accident, the stories clearly indicated that only Hyde, if he were recovered, could convincingly establish what had happened.

After JFK was assassinated, and attempts by the CIA, the Bureau, and the Defense Department to blame it upon Castro and the Soviets had been quashed, all interest in Hyde's condition and whereabouts simply died. The LaGrange Daily News settled for the shortest story on the inside the next day, entitled "Searchers Find No Trace of Glenn Hyde", and other papers across the country hardly had more. The mystery was not clarified either six month later when Hyde's survivors received his Distinguished Flying Cross for a flight he made in January 1963, a Fifth Oak Lead Cluster to the Air Medal for flights which did not include his apparently fatal one, and there was no mention of any Purple Heart for his apparent demise.

In sum, this appears to be the dirtest kind of covert action possible - what could easily have led to the resumption of the Missile Crisis if matters had gone according to plan in Dallas - and it is impossible to believe that Goss did not have it in mind when he referred to "interesting moments in the Florida Straits." He should be grilled at least about what was going on, and what really happened to Hyde. Is he living, for example, somewhere else under an assumed name?

For Senators disinclined to raise such explosive questions about old operations, I would remind them that this might well constitute treason - what one would hardly expect of a DCI officially committed to following constituted authority, especially when it is seeking a mandate to carry out all kinds of preemptive attacks, especially on Castro's Cuba, and his cohort in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. Come January, if Goss is confirmed, he could carry out legally what he attempted treacherously behind the back of the Kennedy administration, and at the President's expense.

Enlightenment

Do you feel like you're living in some Orwellian nightmare? Or perhaps you feel as if you're plugged into The Matrix? Well if so, you've come to the right place. No matter how messed up you thought the world was, by the time you've finished reading some of the things I've found on my travels in Cyberspace you'll realise that 1984 was just a typo!

A note to the non-ravers out there: codshit is
NOT a derogatory or insulting term and bears no relation in offensiveness to its four-letter cousin, it's a word used to describe the nonsense that people sometimes talk when they are off their heads. To understand what codshit is watch the film Human Traffic.

Comments are welcome, but before you waste perfectly useful energy abusing me please take a moment to reflect on the basic right we all have to express ourselves!

Please remember that I am not telling you what to think or believe, take everything you read here with a large grain of salt!

Wisdom

If you confront the Universe with good intentions in your heart it will reflect that and reward your intent... usually... It just doesn't always do it in the way you expect.
.: G'kar :.

So there, we have figured it out, go back to bed America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed America, your government is in control again. Here, here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed America, here's American Gladiators. Here's 56 channels of it. Watch these pituitary retards bang their fuckin skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go America, you are free... to do as we tell you.
.: Bill Hicks :.

Let there be no doubt that the people of the free world are engaged in a war... In the next few years, we are either going to see the people of the free world rise up against these fascists, now setting the stage for global war, or we are going to see the end of democracy as we know it with martial law the end result.
.: David Shayler :.

Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.
.: Albert Einstein :.